Paul Johnson has been Director of the IFS since January 2011. He is also currently visiting professor in the Department of Economics at University College London. Paul has worked and published extensively on the economics of public policy, with a particular focus on income distribution, public finances, pensions, tax, social security, education and climate change. He was awarded a CBE for services to the social sciences and economics in 2018. As well as a previous period of work at the IFS his career has included spells at HM Treasury, the Department for Education and the FSA. Between 2004 and 2007 he was deputy head of the Government Economic Service. Paul Johnson is currently also a member of the committee on climate change and the Banking Standards Board.
This book is the antidote to naivety that our political class needs... The story he tells may leave you reeling... Johnson's buoyant yet acerbic style will keep you engaged. The sobering realities he lays out are peppered with entertaining asides * Sunday Times * A treasure trove of killer facts * Guardian * Read it, absorb it, and understand how the country works. Johnson uses his talent for crunching the complex into the comprehensible to produce a cheerfully skeptical guide to the British state, revealing it's wisdom and idiocy, and where our money really goes. * Laura Kuenssberg * This is an important book by the economist who has set the terms of so much political debate over the past decade. If you want to understand why crazy politics routinely trumps economic rationality in government choices, read this. * Robert Peston * Paul Johnson - the oracle of fiscal - has provided the perfect guide through this dense thicket of fiscal facts and fictions, both explaining the hard choices we now face and why, as citizens, it matters that we understand and act wisely when making them * Andy Haldane * Fire and passion, combined with the facts. Every politician should get a copy, as the tales of short-sighted, election-fixated, cowardly decision-making are so depressing. And your way forward looks so blindingly sensible. * Polly Toynbee *